Crusading doctor fought oppression, prejudice - and inoculations

"My Dearest: - I think of you constantly, and hope you will grow up a brave and good man. Remember that time is money, and that to waste it is a crime."

- Gazette, Thursday, Aug. 1, 1878

The letter was just a few lines long, but the name of its sender at the bottom, "G. Garibaldi," gave it undeniable heft.

The great Italian liberator Giuseppe Garibaldi "has sent the following characteristic letter to his little godson, the son of Dr. A.M. Ross of Montreal," The Gazette said by way of introduction.

The Italian concluded his message for his young namesake, Norman Garibaldi Ross, with two more sentences: "Embrace with ardour and steadfastness sound and liberal principles. I send you an affectionate embrace and a father's wish for your future happiness."

Little Garibaldi's father, Alexander Milton Ross, was born in Belleville, Ont., in 1832. Still in his teens, he moved to New York where he eventually found work as a compositor on the Evening Post. The newspaper was owned by the poet and political progressive William Cullen Bryant.

The elder Ross imbibed his employer's hatred of oppression, and it might have been through Bryant that he met Garibaldi. Following the failure in Italy of the uprisings of 1848-49, Garibaldi fled to the United States where he became, of all things, a candle maker on Staten Island. He returned to his homeland in 1854, and Ross kept up the connection until the Italian's death in 1882.

While setting type for Bryant by day, Ross began studying medicine at night and earned his MD in 1855. He immersed himself in the anti-slavery movement and became friendly with other activists like the essayist Emerson, the poets Whittier and Longfellow, and the radical abolitionist John Brown. During the U.S. Civil War, Abraham Lincoln used him as a secret agent against Confederates in Canada.

Daringly, Ross used his lifelong passion for nature to advance the cause. He'd ask plantation owners for permission to wander about their property, observing birds and other wildlife, but once on his own would pass supplies and advice to slaves anxious to escape.

He settled in Montreal in the later 1870s. By then, Italy was at last independent of Austria, and Garibaldi was living in retirement on a rocky island off Sardinia. Ross wrote to him after his son was born in 1875, and the result was the brief letter that appeared in The Gazette.

Ross made a similar request of the family of John Brown, who had been hanged in 1859 following his ill-fated raid on Harpers Ferry, Va. "If you can send my little Garibaldi an autograph letter of your father or any memento by him," Ross wrote, three months after Garibaldi's letter arrived, "it will be highly prized and sacredly treasured while he lives."

In 1885, smallpox devastated Montreal. By late summer, after a slow start, it was well entrenched. City council decreed that vaccination, for nearly a century a proven though by no means common protection, should be compulsory. Many, especially in poor, French-speaking parts of the city, resisted. How could disease be cured by the injection of more disease, they seemed to say. Soldiers were called out to help suppress rioting.

Ross was a leader in the anti-vaccination fight. Forced inoculation was an affront to human rights, he argued in letters, in posters, to anyone who would pay attention. Besides, it was ineffective. Cleanliness, of both people and of the houses and streets where they lived, was the way to go.

Fortunately, Ross and his allies were in the minority. The vaccination campaign took hold, virus-killing cold weather returned and by the end of the year the epidemic was in retreat. Still, more than 3,200 people died in the city proper, with hundreds more in outlying suburbs.

In October that year, Ross left Montreal. As his train entered Ontario, quarantine inspectors approached him and everyone else for proof they had been vaccinated. On Ross's arm they found three tell-tale puncture marks. Though he claimed otherwise, Ross the great anti-vaccinator had himself been vaccinated.

For the rest of his life he would continue to fulminate against vaccination and drugs, and on behalf of clean living and individual freedom. He died in 1897 in Detroit.

Garibaldi Ross became a doctor like his father but seems to have been denied at least some of the "future happiness" his famous godfather had wished for him. He died in 1902, at the comparatively young age of 27.

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